To answer your question, well yes and no. Your idea sound good, about pumping it up to a reservoir. You can stock pile water for when you do not have electricity or fuel to pump plus you can take advantage of rain water as well. But this would be very expensive unless you have unlimited supply of labor. Better yet would just have a giant holding tank (40K gal or better). This would be cheaper to build but then you need to look at your supply of power.

PVC is what they call it, some places it is easy to get. We are lucky in our area as many international groups area moving into the area to assist small (1 to 20 manzana) farmers. So a lot of technical support is moving in.

You also need to look at your slope to see how much pressure you will get out of the fall line. This will not be an issue if you want to use “bubblers” and not sprinklers.

A good place to get information is youtube, they have it all as everyone is looking to get their 15 minutes of fame, look there for some info.

I'm working on an agricultural project down in El Salvador with a couple of my friends and although they know enough about irrigation to get this done, I want to learn some more before I get down there. The land is 40 hectares and is adjacent to a river that has plenty of water all year round. There is a hill that slopes down to the river. Would it make sense to build a small reservoir on top of the hill, pump the water up, and then let gravity take it from there through asequia? I notice you use pvc pipes. Is that what they call a drip system. Is there somewhere I can learn more about very cheap, very low tec solutions?